A New Buddy

Today Duke goes to his new home. Duke is a seven-week old Golden Retriever/Lab mix whose mother, Kinsey, was rescued back in January by one of my established clients. Kinsey had been running wild in some backwoods of Tennessee and had a litter of pups last fall. My client saw her and fell in love, so brought her home. When she brought Kinsey into the clinic for an examination, I knew this dog was pregnant again. She was thin and very timid, but otherwise seemed in good health. We got the results of her blood test the next day-she was infected with heartworms.

We x-rayed and ran more blood tests, and determined that Kinsey was in the final trimester of her pregnancy. The safest course for "mom" was to let her have the puppies, treat her for heartworm disease after the pups were weaned, then spay her. She whelped seven healthy pups on February 7. However, my client brought the puppies to me on Feb. 18 and said that a couple of them weren't nursing. One pup was lifeless, dehydrated, with no suckling reflex. Three others were dehydrated and weak. The mother's milk was drying up as a consequence of the heartworm disease; her body just could not sustain the extra energy requirements that nursing seven big puppies required. The owner had named all the puppies and most of them already had homes, so it was very traumatic for her to see the puppies fading away before her eyes. After much discussion and tears on both sides, we decided to euthanize the four weak pups, so the owner could concentrate her efforts on trying to nurse the three that were still healthy.

I was curious to see if any of the three healthy pups would eat a soft canned food at this early age, so my assistant brought some to try to feed them. We put the food on our fingers and put it into the puppies' mouth and they ate. The three weak puppies started whining when they smelled the food, so we put some in their mouths and they gulped it down eagerly. I then tried to put some in the nearly dead pup's mouth and to my surprise, he tried to swallow weakly! At this, the owner began crying; we quickly scrapped any idea of euthanasia and came up with a treatment plan. We would keep the puppies at the clinic during the day to feed them and the owners would take the night shift. We put a tube down their throats into their stomachs to give them formula. It was hard, messy work; the puppies seemed to eat and poop 24/7. If they weren't being fed, they were being bathed! We did this for two weeks until the puppies were eating solid food.

Tube feeding is the quickest way to get nutrition into a large group of big puppies like these, but there is a risk of aspiration. We understood the risk, but chose to tube feed, rather than bottle feed, so that the pups would be fed a larger amount and there would be less chance of losing them to malnourishment.

The tube sometimes goes into the trachea instead of the esophagus in young animals because their gag reflex is not fully developed. Then, if formula is administered through the tube, it goes into the lungs instead of the stomach and the puppy basically "drowns". This did happen to one of the pups one weekend at home. Now we were down to six pups, but they were all growing and thriving.

Duke, the once nearly dead pup, was now the biggest, but was the only one without a home. Last week, Sara, one of my clinic staff, came to me and told me that she and her husband had decided to adopt Duke. Duke is 2 weeks old in the picture of Sara on the staff page of our website at www.cicerovet.com

Now Duke is almost 12 pounds and a bouncing, healthy puppy, due to a lot of hard work by a lot of people and is God's answer to a lot of prayers! He is the first puppy to leave the litter; Sara and Kevin have bought food, toys, leash, everything a puppy could possibly want or need.

Live long, Duke, you miracle puppy!